New Apple Announcements?

[Matt_H]

Sorry, Apple: "Pros" need the ability to burn discs, add hard drives, expand RAM, and install new PCIe cards - internally. This little monolith of a Mac Pro ain't going to cut it. It's essentially a tall Mac mini with better chips and more ports - no thanks.

[Matt_H]

@ takemehomegrandma & Nostalgiac

From an average-user perspective, your points definitely have merit. Yes, disc burning is getting to be less and less necessary. But if I'm a Pro user, I need to be able to burn a master of my new CD/DVD on a regular basis. I need to be able to slap in a new hard drive as I need it - daisy chaining half a dozen external drives with power supplies and Kensington locks for all of them is a ridiculous option. I need to be able to double my RAM or swap in a new graphics card when I realize I need a little more performance but don't have the budget (or time) to buy and prep a brand new system. I need to be able to add new cards for specialty purposes as the need arises.

If they were positioning this as a mid-range - or even high-end - home desktop system or small office server, I think that would be fair. But to call it "Pro" and target the professional market at the extremely high price tag I'm sure it will have, that's absurd.

[Matt_H]

If I wanted apple news, I would surf to apple sites.

Who cares?

'Cause it's fun to see what our community thinks of "the popular stuff"

[Matt_H]

I'll walk back my criticism a little bit, since it appears now that the Mac Pro RAM will be user-upgradable, at least.

But my main points stand. For a "professional" machine at the price that this thing will go for, one should not have to:

1. Shell out additional cash for a CD drive, expensive external hard drives, Thunderbolt dock, and/or PCIe chassis when the need arises. The only way this severe curtailing of expandability can be justified is if the machine itself is significantly cheaper than the current model, which is highly unlikely.

2. Deal with the clutter of all that external crap on one's desk. Tower cases were invented to clean up the mess of peripherals we had all over the place in the 80s and early 90s. They're a good concept, worthy of the market they're intended for, and shouldn't be thrown away just because some Apple engineers think circles are cool.

Actually, what I really worry about is the copycat designs this will spawn. PC manufacturers came out with some truly horrendous case designs after the first iMac appeared.

[Matt_H]

@ Matt_H
The HP case you linked to is nasty...
...but this one is even worse:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16811112217

What a stinker.

Ick. It's like the TARDIS and that sailboat building in Dubai had a baby. Glad it's out of stock and discontinued!

[Matt_H]

The positive thing is that you *won't* have to shell out this extra cash if you don't have those needs, as opposite to a tower where everyone must pay for this stuff because it's included in the package and no way around it! Personally I'd be more pissed if I was forced to pay for a stupid optical drive that I won't ever use, and that only makes the case bigger and bulkier than it had to be!

Yeah, instead you'll be paying for it and it won't be included!

The new Mac Pro would be a perfectly fine machine at a $1000 or even $1500 price point. But I'm sure they'll be charging the same (or more) as the current model, and customers will be getting a hell of a lot less. The Thunderbolt, CPU, graphics, and disk speed improvements do not make up for the difference.